Its half-term and I'm catching up on films. Just enjoying Captain America: the Winter Soldier. Besides the fabulous Helicarriers, which look amazingly like the SpaceX Nuclear Pulse, I was intrigued by a reference to the Greatest Generation.
Having not heard it before I looked it up. It was coined by Tom Brakow and describes the generation pf Americans which grew up during the Great Depression and went on to win World War II.
Comic book super soldier Captain America is supposedly part of the Greatest Generation, but as the term was only coined in 1998 this could be a reverse-anachronism! I will have to ask Bill.
Forgiving Brakow an over-zealous patriotism, for surely he meant the generation from all allied countries and not just the US, I am still fascinated by the labels given to entire sweeps of human kind.
I myself, according to Wikipedia, am part of the Baby Boomers, who apparently, consider ourselves 'special'. I'm not sure about that but do feel as though the 1960's were special and would prefer, if indeed we need a label at all, to be part of a space-age generation. But maybe this accolade belongs to the mid-to late 1950's. Dunno.
Whatever boffins might think, the events, pup culture and ethos of that decade did make me who I am today.
What do think about generations readers?
Pup? I meant of course pop! Though we did have a lovely family dog called Shandy back then!
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to classifying and thinking about generations, I've found this scheme at the HiLoBrow website most interesting: http://hilobrow.com/category/generations-2/ As for myself, I'm in the group they classify as 'OGXERS', so-called Original Gen-Xers: http://hilobrow.com/2010/02/27/generations-12-ogxers/
ReplyDeleteIf the term 'greatest generation' was used in a depression era fil, it would be an anachronism, as it wouldnt come into usage for decades. Im a child of the Space Age, that period dominated by the rush to land on the moon. As a boy, nothing else was on my radar. The Age of Aquarius!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting JD and Bill. We don't have a choice which generation we are born into. I suppose the choice is how we react to the events going on around us. The question is, wouldn't every generation react the same to those events?
ReplyDeleteI suspect Tom Brokaw -- an American news anchor, or newsreader as you folks more sensibly call them! -- was only thinking of Americans when he coined the phrase "Greatest Generation," but it could use a bit of extra context. He was being more than a bit curmudgeonly. The unstated goal of the comparison is to bash the generation born after the war, the ones who grew up to be hippies and worn their hair long and protested the war in Vietnam instead of signing up to fight it. There's a hint of "why couldn't those good for nothings have been more like their parents, they had everything handed to them, young people today don't even know they're born, et cetera and so forth..." So there is a cultural conflict in this that's specific to American society.
ReplyDeleteBut no generation is really "greater" than any other, each one faces its own challenges and does the best it can. Using one generation as a tool to bash another with is just silly.
Thanks for that Richard. It makes a lot more sense now. Generation bashing, that's certainly a step-up from plain bullying in the playground! There are similar sentiments in the UK. I think my own parents wanted me and my siblings to have a childhood they could never have had because of WWII. I can imagine that emotions must have been running high as veterans got older and their kids grew up to enjoy the freedoms they'd won. Probably a unique generational clash as you say, although veterans of modern conflicts and their families will still have it tough as they return home to peacetime and the trifles of daily life.
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